No Country for Women - Humanism, Secularism, Feminism

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 40 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

EVENTS

His crime is he is ‘too handsome’.

Omar Borkan Al Gala. He is sexy. Isn’t he?

He is a poet, photographer, and an actor. He looks too sexy because of his qualities. He was one of those handsome men who were deported from Saudi Arabia for being ‘too handsome’.Saudi authorities feared that all Saudi women would be crazy for three handsome men.

Saudi authorities were really very intelligent and wise! If Omar Borkan were in the Jenadrivah Heritage & Culture Festival in Riyadh, it would have been a disaster. No woman would have looked at anything else in the festival but Omar and two other beautiful men. Saudi women were so sick and tired for being suppressed that they could leave their husbands and children for those brown and handsome.

Handsome men came from the UAE. So the Saudi authorities could deport them from Saudi Arabia. But what if some Saudi men are found too sexy and too handsome? Saudi authorities would not be able to deport them from their own country. In that case they should seriously think of forcing sexy men to wear burqas. All beautiful women wear burqas in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Society is now calm and quiet. If all beautiful men wear burqas, everybody will find tranquility they need. Ugly fat men can walk around freely. No one looks at them anyway.

I like Omar. I tell you the truth why I like him so much. I like him for wearing eye-liner. His eye-liner has made him look so cute and yummy!

For my taste he’s overdoing the dreamy eyes bit in the pictures, but yep, handsome guy. Then again, I’ve seen lots of similarly handsome guys in Arab countries, so if Saudi authorities are scared that this one man will, just by virtue of his beauty, distract all Saudi women, there are 2 possibilities:
1) Saudi men are untypically ugly for regional standards,
2) Saudi authorities and the ideology they follow are based in insecurity and feeling inferior.
I guess it’s the second one, and I suspect that’s a part of why they feel such an urgent need to oppress women: These men are afraid that really no woman would like/look at/sleep with/want to have anything to do with them if they had any choice. How ironic that it’s really the way they act that makes them so extremely undesirable.

Actually, a male blogger commenting about how attractive he finds some woman in photos that she expressly had taken to showcase her beauty/attractiveness, and in a context that is directly related to said attractiveness, it’s totally fine.
Because in that case, the looks are actual topic of discussion.

What is rightly deemed sexist is when in a discussion about some completely unrelated topic suddenly a woman’s looks are brought up, usually to evade any actual arguments she makes by trying to devalue her on the basis of her sexual attractivity to some random guy.
Happens very rarely to men, for some reason.

The only newsworthy was that the particular person was denied access somewhere for being “too pretty”. This is of course rediculous, and needs public attention. But when the remainder of the blog post are pictures of the person (a *lot* of pictures) and remarks like he’s “yummy”, I’m sorry, that plainly [i]is[/i] sexist. You can make sexist remarks that are on topic. Again, imagine a male blogger, blogging about how some famous actress or model is denied access somewhere because she is too pretty, then post 10 bikini-clad images of her and saying how “cute” and “yummy” she is.

The pictures are the “see for yourself” evidence for how the guy in question looks. Which does add quite an interesting detail for just how absurd the story is.

Also, these aren’t pictures where the actual thing that the person in them is doing is completely ignored in favour of his looks. The guy actively had these photos taken and published to show off just how handsome he is, and the only thing he does in them is trying very hard to conform to the stereotype of women’s dreams (i.e. look great, be a bit unshaven but at the same time well-groomed, have “sensual” lips and dark, soft eyes and a brooding expression that probably tries to convey thoughtfulness and depth of emotion).
Acknowledging that the looking-good part works is exactly what he aimed for with these photos.

As to how this is acknowledged — “cute” and to a slightly lesser degree “yummy” are just that: Saying “I think he looks pretty.” No entitlement to his body/attention/service. No putting down or disregarding that he’s a person. Totally different from the kind of remark that says “I find her attractive and therefore have the right to use her for my pleasure” (usually with shorter, less abstract and more genitalia-related wording 😉 ).
See the difference?

“See the difference?” – Not quite. Again, this blogpost was about the fact that the guy was expelled for being too handsome, not the fact that Taslima stumbled upon the photos of some handsome guy who she felt the need to comment on. It doesn’t matter that he actively had these pictures taken, that’s irrelevant.

I agree wd Killian…..The Yummy remark z sexist……he z a human….not sphagetti…….the problem wd us z that we r more men,women etc than humans…..i find the objectificatn of humans as a potential threat to humansm……can not we rspct each othr jst bcz we r humans……..a.k.a
living beings right……..???

Hes handsome, kind, smart, and a great businessman. He’s educated, and even gives to charities a lot. But I still keep cheating! Why cant I control this? Am I depressed? Maybe its a victimless crime because no one is getting hurt. What are your thoughts?

He’s lucky to have been deported from Saudi Arabia. His life will be better pretty much anywhere else in the world. Good looks open a lot of doors for men, and he can do almost anything he’d like to do in a society that treats its citizens like humans.